


Between Flight and Longing

by Dien



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: AU, M/M, Pre-Series, WIP
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-12
Updated: 2013-01-12
Packaged: 2017-11-25 04:18:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/635037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dien/pseuds/Dien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will Ingram and Harold Wren make bad life choices at each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1996: Prelude (leap year)

**Author's Note:**

> *WIP.*
> 
> This fic is for Monstar for the 2012 Irrelevant fandom exchange. Monstar is the person who first made my feelings about Will/Finch go from "OH GOD NO DO NOT WANT, SQUICK" to "....dammit, reluctantly I must admit this has captured my imagination." It only seemed fair, then, to write Monstar some Will/Finch as a result.
> 
> This fic is somewhat AU in several respects. Occasional years and ages have been tweaked from what is the more probable 'real' timeline in the show, not that we know solid dates in canon anyway. If you have a problem with the idea of Will/Finch because of squick reasons, please know your comfort levels and don't read.
> 
> The Harold Wren in this fic happens to be a gay man, in direct contradiction of canon. I have absolutely no interest in rehashing why I feel this is in character for Harold, but if you do not like this interpretation of his character, please go console yourself with canon and don't be bothered by me over here in my sandbox. 
> 
> Other possible warnings: references to recreational drug use. Mild references to a villain having a thing for underaged boys. Entitled rich kids. Paranoid billionaires who live their lives on foundations of lies.
> 
> A massive, massive thank you for soubriquet for being my sounding board and shoulder-to-cry-on for this fic in all its strangeness. This story would not exist without his advice, suggestions, and continual graciousness in offering feedback and encouragement.

“Hey, uncle Harold, can I talk to you a second?”

Harold Wren looked up from a book on waterfowl to the young man in the doorway, all floppy blond hair and gangly limbs. He folded his book closed over his finger, settled it and hands into his lap and found a smile for his surrogate nephew.

“Of course, Will. What's on your mind?”

Will threw a glance back over his shoulder towards the kitchen, where Nathan and Olivia's voices could be half-heard, then stepped into the study and shut the door behind him: a gesture Harold noticed and filed away with wry amusement. It reminded him strongly of various escapades through childhood, Will coming to 'uncle Harold' to confess broken windows or less-than-stellar report cards in the hopes that his often-indulgent 'uncle' would find some way to help him break the news to his father.

Of course, Will was getting past the age of footballs through windows. He'd been asking for help with college application essays the other day; God, how time flew. Harold shook his head slightly to himself as Will flopped into the other chair in the study, legs going everywhere. One of his sneakers was untied, and some cartoon character was making a vulgar gesture from the red fabric of Will's T-shirt.

He looked quite like Nathan, Harold thought to himself. Not quite his father's height, and likely he never would be that tall, not with Olivia's genes, but-- and Harold blinked to realize it-- Will was as tall as _he_ was, now.

At the moment, Will was absently chewing his lower lip, studying the glass-faced mahogany of his father's liquor cabinet.

“...if you're wanting to ask if I'll open that and get you some of your father's whiskey, that'd be a no,” Harold teased, and Will gave him a snort and a grin. The boy ran a hand through his hair and leaned back into the chair's leather upholstery.

“Nooo. No. I just, uh... not really sure how to... put this,” Will said with a shrug.

Harold arched his brows, slid his finger from the book and set it down on Nathan's desk. He clasped his hands together atop his knees.

“Well, you have my full attention. What's on your mind, Will?” he asked, trying for an encouraging smile.

Will stretched his legs out before him (Harold resisted the urge to tell him to tie that shoe) and laced his hands behind his head, huffed a breath up at the study's ceiling. “Well...”

Harold waited, patiently. Will might look rather like Nathan at that age, but in his experience the two were very different people. Nathan had never hesitated once at anything in his life, in Harold's recollection-- too often had been the one needing the voice of reason to pull him back from exciting things like driving his truck out onto frozen lakes or seeing how much of a fifth of Jack Daniels one could chug at a party.

Will was more thoughtful, more of his mother to him. Subtle coaxing worked better, and listening-- always listening. Something the child Will had needed a lot of, growing up, with two very busy parents who were often away.

“It's-- I... I'm wondering how you, uh.... like how do you knowifyou'regay,” Will said, the last words coming out in such a rush that it took Harold several seconds to process them, several blank seconds that then transformed themselves into several speechless seconds.

Will had, at the tender age of sixteen, had four 'girlfriends' that Harold knew of. In that, he was _quite_ like his father.

“I'm sorry?” he said, after realizing he was staring.

Will wasn't looking at him, keeping his eyes fixed on the liquor cabinet. His hands slid from his hair to his lap, to fidget with palms and fingers. “How do you know if you-- if you like guys. You know.”

Oh good God. No, he hadn't misheard the initial question, or misunderstood it, or anything else that might be some sort of salvation here.

Harold took a breath. Alright. Alright. Will was sixteen. That was an age where one might-- might ask questions, he supposed. (But the _girlfriends--)_ Now how did he navigate an answer to this? Gently, he supposed. Tactfully. Good advice and, and understanding and acceptance of whatever Will felt he had to say...

“Ah. Well.” Harold pulled off his glasses to buy a few seconds' time, tugged his handkerchief free of its pocket in order to polish the lenses. He cleared his throat. “...well, you-- I suppose that you would-- I imagine that if you felt at-attracted to other boys that that. Might. Be... a clue. Ah, aren't you dating a girl named Melissa, Will?”

Will gave him a look that communicated things about the stupidity of adults and dragged his shaggy hair out of his face with his fingertips. “Melissa was my date to the freshman dance _last year,_ uncle Harold.”

Ah, yes. The infinite nature of a year when one was young. Harold fussed with his glasses as Will kept speaking.

“I like girls is the thing, like, I mean I know I do. I just, well, I mean sometimes when I'm showering with the other guys on the football team or--”

Oh _Christ._ Harold hurriedly interrupted before Will could elaborate on what did or did not happen in communal showers, a little flutter of his fingers as he put his glasses back on.

“--Will, I'm sorry, but why are you asking _me_ this?”

Will tore his gaze from the liquor cabinet to look at Harold. He'd brought one foot up into the chair, and his knee was up to his chest, his chin. Will's brown eyes (Olivia's, not Nathan's) were clear, innocent almost in their frank appraisal.

“....well, you're gay. Right?”

Harold opened and shut his mouth a few times. How had he managed to lose control of this conversation in the space of thirty seconds?

“I've-- Will, I've never said anything that would possibly make you think that,” he said with a clearing of his throat, when he found words again.

Will's look shifted, something wry and ironic and ineffably _teenaged._ “Yeah. Exactly.

“ _You've_ never said anything about it, and neither has Dad, or Mom, and you never have a girlfriend, and sometimes Mom asks about friends of yours who are always guys-- I'm not _dumb,_ uncle Harold. And it's not like you guys need to, I don't know, protect me or something, jeez.”

Turing's ghost save him from perceptive youth. Harold flicked an imploring gaze up at the ceiling and resisted the urge to ask exactly how long Will had known this particular fact about his 'uncle'. It wasn't relevant; Will was the one with questions here.

“...anyway, I'm asking you because...” Will's voice, and gaze, dropped again; fingers sought out a worn patch on his jeans to tug at some threads. “...I mean, it's not like I could talk about this to Dad.”

Harold opened his mouth on something pat and encouraging, _I'm sure he'd be very accepting, Will--_ but it died before it could reach the air. Honesty was a brutal thing. And Nathan-- Nathan was... a good man, Harold's best friend and possessed of many wonderful traits to be sure... as well as a background, an upbringing, that had been conservative to say the least.

There were days Harold marveled their own friendship had survived initial rocky confessions, twenty years earlier. Nathan was _vastly_ more tolerant and accepting than he had been as a young man straight from Texas and his father's worldview, yes; and these days he could truthfully say that he did not think Nathan had any problems with the fact that his friend and business partner was gay.

But there was a gulf between that, and being able to say the same about your only son. Probably Nathan would be alright with it. Probably. Or possibly he would suggest, with the best of intentions, that it was 'only a phase' or that Will just needed to 'get some curiosity out' or something similar.

...never mind that Harold was currently thinking some of the same things. At least he had the sense not to _say_ them.

“Well,” he said softly, and used one fingertip to adjust the spine of his book to be perfectly in line with the edge of the desk.

Will was side-eyeing him with a sort of wary hopefulness. Again, much the same as other escapades of youth: the cautious optimism that 'uncle Harry' might be able to fix things. Except that this wasn't the question of a child.

What he wouldn't _give_ for a broken window and ten years back on the clock.

Harold drew his hands back from the desk into his own lap. “Well, Will,” he said in a volume that was mindful of Nathan and Olivia just down the hall, preparing dinner, “I suppose that you know whether or not you're attracted to boys much the same way you know if you're attracted to girls. Think about the first time you, ah, you knew you liked a girl, and... and if the same things apply. If you want to do the same-- the same things.”

Will grinned crookedly, brushed his hair back out of his eyes. “I don't think the quarterback wants me to rub dirt in his face and pull on his pigtails.”

Harold exhaled a snort. “ _Yes,_ well, most likely not, no-- I was thinking when you were a little _older,_ your first real girlfriend and all that. I would most definitely advise against pulling on, on, on any bit of the anatomy of the quarterback.”

Will's eyes widened, exaggeratedly, his brows waggling, and Harold felt himself turning red. “ _I didn't mean it like that--_ stop that, you know that I didn't-- _William,_ stop laughing, please--”

“Sorry,” Will said with no trace of remorse, between giggles. Harold shook his head and pulled his glasses from his face to clean them again, despite the fact that they hadn't gotten noticeably dirty in the last minute.

Will brought his other foot up to the chair, wrapped his arms around his legs. His chin rested on his knees, on the denim of his jeans; the humor had faded back to thoughtfulness again as he picked at the same worn patch. “...but I shouldn't, you know, try _anything_ with the quarterback anyway. Really.”

Harold bit his lip as he studied Will. “...erm... do you... _like_ him?”

Will's eyes were older than they should be, Harold thought, when Will glanced back up at him. A jerky shrug of his shoulders. “Does it matter? You know what they say when a guy's slow in practice or misses a catch or whatever? _Fag._ 'Don't be such a faggot, man'. There's like... there's _no_ way I'm gonna... no. Not with any of them. I just... it's kinda fucked up, you know? Showering and all, and like, I can see everything, and they can see _me,_ so if they look over and see that I'm--”

“Y-yes, I get the idea,” Harold interrupted again. He laced his fingers together. Alright. Alright. Whether it was merely Will being curious or not, he needed proper advice, and against everything Harold would have preferred, it seemed that he was the one to have to offer such.

“I think maybe you should do some reading,” he began, and Will rewarded him with a look of such disgust he stopped with his mouth open.

“Uncle _HARRY.”_

“...what?”

“No _way_ do you tell me that I'm supposed to figure this out in a _book._ There isn't like, _Your Feelings, Yourself_ for 'hey, I get a hard-on when I'm in the--' ”

Yes, there it was, the mental image he had been doing so _very good_ at not remotely thinking about. Harold quickly raised a hand in protest, then used it to rub at the bridge of his nose. “ _Will,_ I really don't need details.”

“....uh. Yeah,” said Will, and flushed as it perhaps occurred to him what he had actually just said. “Yeah. Sorry.”

“Yes,” he sighed. “Right. Well. If you're rejecting literature out of hand— really, Will, there's been a number of good novels published lately--”

“I didn't say I was rejecting it,” Will interrupted with a guilty look. “Just... I don't think I'm gonna find my answers in a book?”

Will never had been much of a reader, Harold thought with a sigh. On the plus side, it saved him having to think of titles to suggest-- there was no way he was going to recommend _The Swimming Pool Library,_ or _The City and the Pillar,_ to _Will_ of all people. God, no. Film suggestions were equally as problematic.

“Then I suggest,” he said, “that... that you try and find a place where you might be able to.... _safely_ express your interest, and-- and see what happens, and how you feel about that.”

“Places I'm not gonna get picked up and tossed in the dumpster, you mean,” Will said with his chin cupped in his hands.

“Yes. Yes, places like that.”

“Great idea. You know any?”

Harold returned his gaze to the ceiling and to seeking out the help of whatever friendly spirits might be in attendance. None presented themselves.

It had been several _years_ (God, nearly a decade) since he'd last gone to a bar. And the problems were the same as suggesting literature or movies: the gay bars he could remember were not places he wanted a young man like _Will_ \-- someone whose scraped knees he'd bandaged not so many years ago, someone who he remembered as falling asleep during bedtime stories-- exploring his sexual identity. Wasn't there some sort of, some sort of... G-rated, Disney-sponsored, discover-yourself option?

“You could try a bookstore,” he said at last, thinking fast. Will's stare communicated more wordless objection. Harold kept talking. “As a place to just meet people, Will-- and yes, you might find some books, too-- but it'd be a, a safe, welcoming... an accepting place. There's the Oscar Wilde Bookshop. It's in the Village.”

“Do you go there?” Will asked with curiosity.

“Sometimes,” Harold admitted reluctantly. “And that whole area, there's coffee shops around-- look for anywhere with the, erm, the rainbow flag, that's-- well, that'll be a safe place too. Just.... well, can you promise me you'll-- go in daylight, and not try and sneak into bars, or--”

Will laughed, the thoughtless laugh of the young, sliding down in his chair. “You sound like my _dad._ Actually, no. Dad'd give me tips on _how_ to sneak into bars.”

“....yes, he probably would,” Harold said softly. _And I'm not your father, however much you're the closest thing I have to a son._ “Promise me, Will?”

“Yeah, okay, promise,” Will said breezily. “Do you--”

They were saved by a rap on the door followed by it opening, and Nathan's head sticking in with his brows arched at them both. “Dinner's on. What the heck are you two getting up to in here?”

He caught Will's slight tension, the flick of Will's eyes towards him. Harold held up the book from the desk. “Boring your son with a discourse on Mallard ducks.”

“Jesus Christ. Come on out here before you sprout wings,” Nathan grinned, and used a big hand to ruffle the hair of his son when Will passed by. Harold watched silently, then followed the Ingrams, father and son, to the dining room.

The moment, and the conversation, and the worry, faded and slipped away and was lost to the clatter of silverware, the tink of glasses against one another and the sounds of family.


	2. 2001: January (lots of people go mad in january)

Harold Wren hurried along the sidewalk of Christopher Street, coat buttoned up to his chin, scarf wrapped around the lower half of his face beneath his hat. His hands were jammed into his pockets.

It had snowed earlier, very picturesque in the late afternoon light, but it was night-time now and the snow was a gray slush in the gutters. The headlights of cars danced against the windows of coffeehouses, a shoe store already closed, boutiques, a nail salon. The bars and restaurants would be open for hours yet but the shops were turning over signs, locking doors, hauling security cages shut.

He pulled his hand from his pocket long enough to check his watch. The bookstore was holding _Moab is My Washpot_ for him, and he dearly wanted to pick it up and settle in at home with that and a hot cup of tea. Now if he could just make it to Oscar Wilde in the next six minutes.

The sidewalk was full of pedestrians like himself, eager to get to this or that store in time for that last minute purchase-- or just to get somewhere warm. The wind was picking up and the temperature was dropping. Harold tucked his chin down to his chest and bulled forward on the strip of sidewalk closest to the street, skirting the slower-moving couples and groups who were hugging the walls of the buildings.

The door to one of the bars-- _Pieces_ , the window proclaimed it to be-- opened abruptly, giving him three assaults almost simultaneously: a blast of warm air, coupled with the noise of drunken karaoke, and a man's body that strode without looking from behind the open door and intersected with his own path before he could change trajectory.

If the sidewalk hadn't been damp, he might have kept his balance; as it was Harold's shoes skidded for traction before slipping over the edge of the sidewalk and into the accumulated snow in the gutter. His hands flailed for balance-- landed on the hood of a parked Toyota nestled close to the curb, as his knee barked painfully against the wheel well. The car alarm instantly started shrieking.

Harold grimaced, as much for the dirty snow falling into his Italian leather shoe as for the bang to his kneecap. He yanked his foot free of the slush then spun around on the sidewalk.

“ _Excuse_ you.”

“Hey, maybe don't walk in front of doorways and it's not a fucking problem!”

“The door's _glass,_ maybe if _you'd_ watched where you're going--”

Harold was halfway into proper New York City courtesies (accompanied by the fitting backdrop music of the car alarm) when it occurred to him he recognized the man in front of him. Thompson. It was Something Thompson. (Dave or Dan or Don...) In his forties, just under the six-foot mark, the lean body of a runner, with his gelled salt-and-pepper hair cut in a probably-expensive style. The clothes were expensive too, a fine wool coat over a cashmere sweater. Very probably he had been the best-dressed man in the club behind him.

Harold Wren was not particularly intimidated by the wealth, or wardrobes, of others. He knew Thompson by reputation, and one overheard encounter in a bookstore. He had not been impressed by Thompson's reading material, and less impressed by his reputation.

Behind the taller man was his presumed date for the evening, a pretty blond boy under-dressed for January, staring open-mouthed at the conflict. Harold barely noticed him, busy working up a fine bit of umbrage.

“You could _see me_ when you stormed out of your primary colors-club there-- I think my knee is bleeding, an apology isn't too much to ask for,” Harold seethed primly, yanking his scarf down in order to speak more clearly.

“Hey, you know what, I can see you're really upset about it, so why don't you write a sob story to the fucking Times, or go home and tell it to your cat, huh?”

Harold phrased an appropriately scathing response-- he briefly even considered a descent into profanity-- but the words caught in his throat, froze there in the chill air as he stared wide-eyed over Thompson's shoulder at the young man behind him.

The moment's hang-up he'd felt at realizing he recognized Thompson was nothing compared to realizing he recognized his date.

It was Will. He stared to be sure, but yes, yes, it was Will, no mistaking the hair (currently spiked with gel as it was), or the brown eyes (currently ringed with eyeliner), or the lips frozen in that shocked O (dear God, dear God, was that _lipgloss?)_.

Will's eyes met his own, helpless and bemused and embarrassed and probably thirty other things besides to unpack in that look.

He couldn't have stopped himself from taking in the rest of Will's outfit if he'd tried. He'd caught a half-a-glimpse of it when turning, and now, like a man who must look to see if the knife-wielding maniac is really behind him, he had to stop and verify that his eyes had seen what they had seen.

Under-dressed for the cold, he'd thought at first. Yes, that held. No doubt it had been warm in the club, dancing bodies and plenty of alcohol. Will was wearing a thin white tank-style shirt that might have been some sort of lycra or something-- it was quite closely following every contour of his body-- and a pair of black jeans faded and worn as only two-hundred-dollar jeans could be, slung low on his hips with red-and-white striped briefs semi-visible above his studded belt.

The shirt was sweaty in places, as were Will's bare arms. A black leather wristband and nails painted an electric blue completed the ensemble. Will's face was red, and getting redder.

He became belatedly aware that Thompson had put a hand on his shoulder, that Thompson was still talking.

“--to your _fucking_ self, yeah, he looks good and he's _mine_ so get your sorry ass back over to the Duplex or wherever you crawled out of, okay?”

Harold dragged his attention back to Thompson with a frown. It occurred to Harold he wasn't feeling the cold anymore, or the sting of his knee. Mostly what he was feeling was angry.

Had this man put his _hands_ on Will? Kissed him? Done _more_ than that? Barked his sorry little claim of ownership around, like a dog marking a hydrant? On Nathan's son?

He shoved the man's hand off his shoulder and stared into Thompson's face with cold loathing until Thompson stopped talking.

“You may not talk about him like that. Go away now.”

Thompson colored splotchily in anger, which somewhat ruined his features. “Excuse me? _Excuse me?_ The hell is this? Do you have any idea who the fuck I _am?”_

“Yes, Mr. Thompson, I do,” Harold snapped. “I know exactly who you are: you're a loudmouthed braggart who likes to flash his money around barely-legal-- or underaged-- boys on Saturday nights in the hopes that someone hunting a sugar daddy will pretend to find you tolerable for the next few hours. You like to tell people you're in _property management_ which sounds nicely impressive unless one happens to know that the _properties_ you _manage_ are some rat-infested apartments out in the shithole of Staten Island.”

There were people watching, now. The front of Pieces was a glass window, and some men had been coming out to see if there was going to be a fight, or perhaps to help in case of injury, or maybe just to shut up the car alarm; there were passersby who had stopped too, halted by the electronic wailing and then by the little melodrama.

Harold pitched his voice louder to carry. “I know your taste in literature is execrable-- or was it _not_ you I heard pestering the clerk at Oscar Wilde if he didn't have anything with _younger_ boys hidden away, somewhere? I know-- gossip is a wonderful thing, Mr. Thompson-- I know that two of your past 'dates' have brought charges against you. Discreetly dismissed, of course, but rumor has it you had to sell your Ferrari to finance the bribe to get one of the young men to drop things.”

Thompson had gone from splotchy to pale, gray eyes darting around the few spectators. The alarm was still screaming mindlessly.

Harold stepped closer, backing Thompson up a step. He dropped his voice again to hiss, “And I know that young man's father, Mr. _Thompson;_ and I know where he keeps his shotgun, and he has two hundred acres of property in upstate New York where they will never, ever find your body, if I tell his father about you. And I'm very tempted to.

“Go away, Mr. Thompson. Go away right now.”

Thompson's eyes flicked to Will, then to the other faces in the crowd, back to Harold's. He sneered, affected a shrug of disdain and a step backwards, somewhat ruined by the fact that the car was in his way.

“Bullshit, is what this is. This twink means so much to you though? Feel the fuck free. You get in my way again, you'll be talking to my lawyers about slander,” he gritted, and shoved off from the car, making sure to hit Harold's shoulder in the process.

Harold let him go, his anger collapsing into relief as the taller man strode away down the sidewalk, still cursing. Oh thank God-- he wasn't entirely sure what he'd have done if the man had taken a swing or something similar.

Although the young men who'd come out from the bar all looked a fairly athletic lot, he mused. One was muttering 'good riddance'. Perhaps Thompson had been aware of their presence.

Either way the crisis was past. Harold blinked several times at the Toyota, with its lights flashing and horn blaring, as it occurred to him what he'd just done. Oh, oh, yes, he was quite lucky that that hadn't escalated to physicality-- if he'd had more time to think about it surely there'd have been a better way to handle it, but he hadn't, he'd just-- he'd seen Will and the thought that this awful man might be--

 _Will._ Harold spun around again on the sidewalk.

Will was still there, arms wrapped around himself now against the cold, not that that helped much. It might be for modesty as much as warmth, Harold thought-- that shirt was really dreadfully thin. Will stood there shivering, giving him an awkward pained look, a helpless sort of smile that had _Don't tell Dad?_ writ large in it.

Harold opened his mouth to ask what the hell Will had been thinking, then closed it. He stared at Will a few more moments, then shook his head helplessly.

Out of all the things he almost said, what came out was: “Don't you have a _coat,_ Will?”

“....it's... it's in his car,” Will said, with his face pink.

Harold stared another few seconds, then sighed and began unbuttoning his own coat.

****

The coffee shop was full of other people with similar ideas about hot beverages. Harold wrapped his fingers around his paper cup of sencha tea.

“Are you-- are you alright?” he asked Will, sliding the coffee across the tiny table to him.

Not so many years ago, Will would have been swimming in a coat of his. Now, the cuffs rode two inches high on Will's wrists as reached out for the coffee cup. Harold stared at that two-inch strip of skin and the cognitive dissonance it represented.

“I'm fine,” Will said with a little shrug. “Are _you_ okay?”

“What? Of, of course I am.”

“You're shaking,” Will said quietly, and Harold gave him an owlish blink. Will nodded with his chin down at Harold's paper cup; he followed the look to see temblors rippling in the liquid's surface, his fingers quivering against the cup.

“Oh.” He let go, pressed his palm flat to the table. “Ha. Nerves. I suppose.”

The weight of Will's gaze drew his own eyes back up. Really, the effort was in _not_ staring at Will, the familiar face so altered by circumstance and by the addition of a few touches of cosmetics. Will-but-not-Will.

It had been five years since Will's disconcerting questions in his father's study, an exchange that in all truthfulness Harold had managed to forget. In the weeks right after it he had anxiously braced for more questions, every time the family schedule had brought himself and Will together; and he'd bit down on questions himself, _had Will gone to the bookstore, what did he think, what was the verdict?_

He hadn't asked them, and Will hadn't volunteered any information. Things had seemed to return to normal-- Will dating pretty girls with pretty smiles, Will and college applications and the SAT and arguments in the Ingram household over med school when Will hadn't even selected an undergraduate school yet, and which college had the best football team.... Normality, Ingram-normality, and Harold had relaxed, and then let himself forget.

Whatever it was, whatever curiosity or impulse, had been dealt with, and Will had moved on. Surely.

The memory of it flooded back now. Harold peeled his glasses off and rubbed at his face. His evening had been supposed to be tea and a new book, not tea and... and... Will-in-lipgloss at gay clubs in the Village.

“Don't tell my dad,” Will said soft, almost lost into his coffee cup, the vocalization of what had been on his face outside the club.

“Of course I won't,” Harold sighed, dropping his hands down to his paper cup again. “--you broke your promise to me,” he said a second later, half-accusing.

“....huh?”

“No coming to the Village after dark-- no bars?”

“....” Will gave him a stare that threatened to burst into disbelieving laughter. “....Harold, I was in _high school_ when I said that. I'm twenty- _one.”_

“Not until February you're not,” Harold snapped. Will rolled his eyes.

“In three weeks, I am twenty-one. How long am I supposed to not go to bars for, or go out at night?”

“Until you're forty-seven or your father and mother are both dead, whichever comes first,” Harold retorted.

Will snickered a little, then sobered up. He ran a finger along the edge of his cup, stared down into his coffee.

“Derek wasn't a bad guy,” he said, and when Harold opened his mouth to protest, Will raised a finger to forestall him. “I mean, not to _me,_ not before tonight. I can see he's a dick now, don't worry. And that's skeevy as fuck if he was doing all what you said, and he was a dick to you too-- I'm just saying, it wasn't awful when I was out with him or anything. He treated me alright.”

Harold wasn't sure if he was relieved or frustrated. He leaned back in his chair.

“He treated you _alright?_ Is that-- is that what you're going to be happy with, Will? Being treated _alright?”_

Will shrugged, his brown eyes watching the coffeehouse employees bustling behind the counter. Harold's fingers tightened around his cup, releasing only as he remembered this wasn't a solid mug but flimsy paper.

“ _Will,”_ Harold said, sharp enough to drag Will's eyes back to meet his own. “--Will. You-- what's the appeal, a man like that? You're not... you're a handsome, bright, talented young man, Will, there is absolutely no reason for you to _settle_ for anyone. You deserve better.”

“If you say so,” Will answered with trademarked Ingram grin, trying to make it a joke. Harold felt a stab of cold in his gut at the false lip-glossed smile on Will's face.

“Don't do that. I _do_ say so.” God, what was this? Will was a wonderful boy-- man-- and while Harold knew as well as anyone that Olivia and Nathan had been busy, busy people as parents, Nathan especially-- it wasn't as if Will had grown up in some wallow of neglect that might lead to esteem issues either. Right? He'd always been told he was loved, shown it-- praised for his successes and accomplishments--

Harold was distracted from a modern-psychology dissection of Will Ingram's childhood by Will flopping back in his chair, legs bumping Harold's own under the small table, Will lifting his painted fingernails to run through his short, spiky hair.

“He had a big dick, okay?”

Proper thought screeched to a derailed halt. Harold stared.

“When you're dating a girl, it's always, you know, on you-- you have to be the one to ask her out, bring her flowers, and it's like this big fucking production,” Will said. “I'm cool with that sometimes. And sometimes I just like to know a guy's staring at my ass when I'm dancing and that he's gonna push me up against a wall later, and whip it out, and we're gonna fuck rough and messy, and Derek did all that just fine--”

“ _Will,”_ Harold managed in incredibly strangled tones, a plea to stop. Will looked back to him, lifted his shoulders once more.

“You asked what the appeal was.”

“I didn't need the R-rated version,” Harold said, pressing his face into his hands.

“ _I_ did,” said a smirking Asian man from the table next to theirs, craning around to give Will an appraising look. Harold shot him a mortified glare.

“ _Excuse me,_ this is a private conversation--”

“It's the Village and we're all practically in each other's laps anyway, there's no such thing. Look, it's pretty clear your friend here grew up sometime when you weren't looking, so stop treating him like a kid,” the interloper said.

“Right-- Will, come on,” Harold exhaled, standing from the table. “It's time you were _home.”_

“Before I turn into a pumpkin?” Will asked blandly, but he got to his feet as well.

The rude stranger called out after them as they pushed for the door, turning heads throughout the coffee shop: “He's right, though! A big dick covers a multitude of sins!”

****

The cabdriver didn't offer to wait for Harold. No doubt, having picked two men up within a block of the Stonewall Inn-- one of whom was dressed as Will was-- he had formed a picture of their relationship that expected to drop them off together anyway.

Harold internally cringed at this, but the thought of trying to explain away the misconception wasn't any better. He, in turn, did not ask the driver to wait.

Besides, he felt there was a bit more lecturing, or advice, or something, due in the course of the evening, and he didn't very well want to do that with a cabdriver running his meter.

Will's studio apartment was on the second floor. Harold followed him up the stairwell mulling over what else needed saying, studying the the stairs and the toes of his shoes hitting each one.

Inside, Will flipped on the lights and Harold stood by the door, shifting his weight from foot to foot and taking in the college-student squalor of Will's apartment. About the same as the last time he'd been by. Not as bad as some, he supposed. Will was not a slob, exactly, but neither was he a housekeeper. There was the usual assortment of clutter; unwashed clothes that Will half-heartedly gathered off the couch and tossed in the direction of his unmade bed.

Will shrugged out of the coat and handed it back to him. “Thanks.”

“Yes, of course,” Harold answered absently, and draped it over his arm. “Will...”

“Yeah?” Will sighed, turning his dark-lined eyes back to him. Harold groped for wisdom, and ended up reaching for his pocket square instead.

Will looked from the offered square of silk up to Harold's face, quizzical.

“Your....” Harold's free hand sketched a circle near his own lips and eyes. “Did _he_ suggest you do that?”

A few indecipherable expressions flickered over Will's face, resolving at last into a set of the jaw that made him look _quite_ like his father. Well. A version of his father wearing pink lipgloss. Which Nathan would likely _not_ approve of, even if he could handle the idea of his son dating men...

“Is there something wrong with me wearing makeup?”

Oh, this was going _so_ well. “No,” Harold said helplessly, and withdrew the pocket square, twisting it in his fingers. “No, of course not, if you-- if you _want_ to, if it's _your_ decision and not...”

“Not someone taking advantage of poor innocent little me?” Will said, crossing his bare arms over his chest.

Harold sighed. “Yes, Will. Something like that.”

Will looked as though he was on the verge of anger-- then he let it go with a puff of his cheeks and a deliberate exhale. A smile, wry and rueful.

“Yeah, well. It's not that. I mean... alright, I didn't know everything about Derek, I'll give you that. But-- come on, Harold, you know I'm not gonna let myself be... _This_ is me too, okay? It's not just me trying to please somebody. Okay?”

Harold pursed his lips, but refolded his pocket square and slid it back into the breast pocket of his suit. “If you say so.”

“Hey.” Will play-socked his shoulder, then dropped his hands to hook them into the belt loops of his jeans. “No turning my own words back on me.”

Will's kitchen was really a disgrace, Harold thought, staring that direction over Will's shoulder. He ground down on the urge to say something about it, something normal, something that would make this evening magically take place a week ago, without the complications of tonight.

“I just want to be sure you're happy, Will,” he sighed. “You deserve someone who will respect you and care about you-- even if you think that all you want is someone with-- with-- physical assets. You can find a partner who'll... er... give you what you want in bed while not being a d-- well.”

Will's lips twitched. “A dick? A douche? A borderline-pedo fuckhead with an ego problem?”

Harold winced and nodded.

“You're still watching your language around me, aren't you?”

This time, Harold found half-a-smile to answer Will's own crooked grin. “Force of habit.”

He turned for the door. Enough lecturing, or advice, for one night, he supposed. “Just be careful, Will.”

“Yeah,” Will said, with a nod, then touched his shoulder. “Hey, Harold?”

“Yes?”

“Thanks for... playing white knight,” Will said, his smile growing, curling with amusement. “You're kinda scary when you're all GTFO, you know that?”

Harold snorted his objection, then remembered he probably shouldn't know what the acronym meant, as far as Will was concerned. “Gee-tee-eff-oh?”

“Never mind,” Will said with a snicker, a shake of his head. “You were just all _rawr!_ for my honor. 'You can't talk about him like that!' It was funny. You've got a hidden badass streak.”

“I don't know about _that,”_ Harold said with a shake of his head, opening the door and stepping out into the hall. It was colder than Will's apartment.

“Nah. You do,” Will said, and pure devilish mischief flashed in his eyes for a half-a-second, all the warning Harold had; Will leaned in much too quickly and there were lips against Harold's own, _warm-soft-lipglossed_ , gone before he could do anything, leaving him beyond speechless, leaving him with nothing but Will's impish smile for half-a-second and then the door shutting in his face.

Harold stared at the door. He heard the deadbolt slide home, Will's footsteps moving away. He continued to stare at the door.

What a horrible, horrible boy Nathan had raised. That was completely unacceptable, joke or no. That was-- no. No, God, no.

He raised his fingers to his lips. They came away with pinkish gloss on them. Cherry. It was cherry.

Harold forced his feet down the stairs, back out to the street. The wind knifed through his suit and he stood gazing at passing cars for three minutes, shivering, until he started trying to hail a taxi.

When he finally remembered to put his coat back on, it smelled of sweat, and hair gel, and Will.


	3. 2001: February (there are things in a man besides his reason)

There was no way he could avoid Will's 21st birthday party, not without eliciting questions from Nathan and Olivia both. He hadn't missed one of Will's birthdays yet. He wasn't about to start now, no matter how bothered he was.

He simply had to put the memory of Will's little joke at his expense out of his mind. Will had been being, quintessentially, _Will;_ this was to be filed in a long list of childhood pranks that had included such high-brow humor as Saran wrap over toilet seats, and food coloring in milk cartons, and Ping-Pong balls inside of cabinets.

This was nothing more or less than that, something done for a reaction. _Very funny, Will._ But it had been three weeks ago and that he still found himself thinking of it at times was-- was--

\--Will had grown up into an attractive young man, yes. There was nothing wrong about admitting that, to one's self, in the privacy of one's own head. One could even be proud about this, that Will was not only good-looking but generous, bright, kind to others, and that one had played some small part in helping a friend's child become a fine young man.

But anything beyond that-- no, there was a line. _Will_ could be thoughtless about crossing it with silly gestures. Harold had no such luxury.

He picked a different coat to wear to the party.

It was at the Ingrams' house, the big one out of town, the one where five years before Will had rendered him speechless in the study. Harold parked his car and studied Will's birthday present. It was already wrapped, of course, but he knew what was in it: a football jersey for the New York Giants, signed by Michael Strahan.

The Giants had been Will's favorite team for as long as Harold could remember, and some questioning of Nathan had elicited the knowledge that Strahan was the team's current hotshot star player, a defensive end (whatever that was. Harold had no interest in football, despite Nathan's many attempts to educate him over the years).

It was a very _safe_ gift, Harold thought. No room for awkwardness.

****

“Hey.”

Harold looked up from a crossword puzzle. Will was in the doorway of the guest bedroom where Harold had retreated from the party and the combined noise of Will's college friends. The jersey was slung over his shoulder.

“Will.” Harold scrounged up a smile. “Does it fit?”

“Dunno. Haven't tried it on yet,” Will said, one shoulder leaned against the doorframe. “Thought you'd left.”

“Oh-- oh, no, just-- it was-- loud, and... Seven-Across was calling my name,” Harold said, holding up the crossword book with a little laugh.

Will didn't smile.

Harold cleared his throat, tapped his pen against the pages of the book, then closed it. The house was quiet, he realized; Will's friends must have gone home.

“Where's your mom and dad?” he asked, and started to push himself up from the chair. Will stepped into the room, shut the door after him. The room shrank.

“Dad had to get back to the office. Mom's on the phone,” Will said. Harold hesitated halfway up from the chair, then sank slowly back down in it. There was nothing to be bothered by. There was no reason to stand. ( _Don't be ridiculous_.)

Will sat down on the edge of the bed, slung the jersey into his lap, and fingered the shiny polyester. Harold watched, his fingers curling the crossword book around his pen.

“Usually you get me challenging gifts,” Will said without lifting his eyes from the fabric, and Harold blinked.

“Sorry?”

“Chess set when I was ten. Telescope when I was twelve. Complete Sherlock Holmes the year after that,” Will recited, softly. “And Asimov, and Heinlein... lots of books.”

“Most of which you didn't read,” Harold said, after a tiny pause.

Will shrugged that away, and wadded the jersey into a ball, unwadded it, wadded it again. Harold cleared his throat.

“--you don't like it? I thought-- well, the Giants, you love them, I mean, I can still remember how excited you were the year your dad got us all tickets to the, the big game, the big bowl, and we all went, your mom and dad and you and I--”

“Super Bowl, Harold. The Super Bowl.”

“Right, yes, the Super Bowl-- you were over the moon, you wore your football helmet around the house for a week before the game, and you--”

“ _Yeah,”_ Will interrupted, dropping his head back to stare at the bedroom ceiling. “I did. Because I was _ten.”_

The silence of an empty house followed his words. A clock was ticking somewhere in the hall. Harold found he couldn't wind the puzzle book any tighter around the pen, and released it; the pages fluttered against his palm with a muted noise like bird's wings.

“If you don't like it I'll return it,” he said, eyes dropping to the carpet. “Your dad said Strahan--”

“Could you _stop_ doing that?”

“I-- what?”

“ 'Your dad'. 'Your mom'. Harold... You _never_ call them that. You say _Nathan_ or _Olivia._ Jesus, I can't even remember how long it's been since you even said 'your mother and father', but it's years at least.”

Harold stared at Will. Will stared back, hands balled into the jersey. Will took a deep breath, pressed his lips together, then said, “Seriously, if you're going to swing this hard into over-reaction, you could treat me like you _actually_ did when I was a kid, and not this weirdass over-exaggerated version of it.”

The clock in the hall was so very loud. “Will....”

“You know what always made you such a great 'uncle'? The fact that you were the only guy among all their friends who'd talk to me like I _wasn't_ a dumb kid underfoot.”

Will got to his feet. He tossed the jersey to Harold, who caught it on reflex.

“I think you'd better return it after all. I've gotten _too old_ for it _,_ you know?”

Harold clutched the bright polyester in his lap while Will yanked the door open, walked away, his footsteps echoing in the big house.

****

Not too far from the Oscar Wilde there was a boutique that sold facial scrubs and henna ink, loose tea and body wraps. Harold had gotten his sencha tea from there a few times, when his usual supplies had been unavailable.

Three days after the party, he stood in the shop, studying rows of tiny glass nail polish bottles in a rainbow of hues. A girl whose apron proclaimed her as both an employee and against cruelty to animals appeared at his elbow, smiling.

“Looking for something for your wife, sir?”

“No,” he said with a little shake of his head. “A friend to whom I owe an apology. What looks good on blonds?”

****

“Mr. Ingram to see you, sir,” and that was all well and good except he hadn't thought to ask _which_ Ingram, and so, Will in his office doorway took him by surprise. He blinked and then smiled, genuine for all it was delayed and hesitant, and Will took that as any permission that might have been needed and breezed in, sailed in, past his vast windows with their vast views. Bringing his scuffed-sneakers-and-denim self into Universal Heritage Insurance.

“Hey.”

“Hello, Will,” Harold said, cautious, but Will's smile was easy and light and if there were still any hard feelings they didn't show in Will's face, which was sporting a scruffy stubble today that none of his own employees could have gotten away with wearing on the premises. It gave Will a devil-may-care kind of look. --not that he was thinking about it.

Will pulled off the hat he was wearing against winter, freeing messy blond hair to fall around his ears. He claimed one of the chairs before his desk and dropped down into it. He was still smiling: sly, with his mouth shut, eyes darting humor at Harold and daring him to guess the cause. Harold arched his brows.

“You look rather like the cat that's caught the canary, Will.” He looked back down to the papers on his desk, back up when Will didn't respond but kept grinning. “Don't you have class?”

“Not today,” Will said, and propped an elbow on the chair's arm, set his chin in his palm, tapped his fingers against his cheek.

He did it until Harold noticed-- noticed the rich, slightly-sparkly green that each of his nails were painted in-- noticed and promptly dropped his pen onto the desk. Will's grin broadened, a sliver of Hollywood-white teeth.

“-- _Will_ ,” Harold said.

“What?”

“It's not for....”

“Wearing?” Will grinned, grinned, grinned.

“Not for wearing to my office at any rate. I thought you might, I don't know-- get use of it when you're... going on your, your dates, or going out to dance, or whatever it is you... do.”

Will's grin became barely-contained mirth. “You could come along sometime.”

“Ha,” Harold said with emphasis, and picked up his pen again.

“We'll paint your nails too so you don't feel left out,” Will offered, brows jumping up and down.

“Don't quit Columbia for the comedy circuit,Will,” Harold advised drily, and picked up his paperwork too. Will snickered and bounced up from the chair, moving to the window to peer out at the Statue of Liberty. Harold kept an eye on him, or at least, the back of his head, darting glances down to his papers then back up again.

Fortunate that this had been a day he'd been at the insurance company, he supposed. Although if he hadn't they would simply have told Will that Mr. Wren wasn't in, so sorry sir, would you like to leave your name... and Will might have, hm, probably called his cell phone...

Will had never sought him out at the insurance company before. He'd _been here,_ yes, in Nathan's company, or even a time or two besides that when he'd been a boy and tagged along (the nice thing about having a company that didn't actually need your presence to function at all was that you could play the roles of boss and babysitter at the same time with no real problems), but for Will to drop by out of the blue was a new thing.

Harold stared at the text of his report not really seeing it, thinking he should probably do something at IFT to alert him if Will entered the building there. Will avoided his father's office like a virulent vat of bubonic plague, but there was a first time for everything. It would not do for Will to discover Harold Wren was also 'working' in his father's building, posing as a low-level programmer.

IFT's lobby's sign-in desk was computerized; it would be the work of thirty seconds to add Will's name to the list of people whose presence would automatically send an alert to his phone. But he was Nathan Ingram's son-- what if the ground floor receptionist simply let him on into the building, thinking that he was exempt from such things as _sign-ins?_

The lobby cameras, then. It would give him an excuse to return to his facial-recognition software, iron out the bugs that had originally caused him to lose interest in the project due to the petty annoyance of code fixes that were neither fun nor challenging...

Will had abandoned the view and was standing next to his desk now-- was poking at the sextant on his desk which was half-buried by papers at the moment-- which brought him out of his own thoughts and back to the moment. He watched Will's green-nailed fingers fiddle with the antique brass.

“Is my apology accepted, then?” he asked.

Will's eyes flicked from the antique to Harold's face, then he gave a little smile, something you could almost call shy.

“Yeah. Yeah, we're good.”

“Good.” Harold returned the smile, a touch bittersweet. He swiveled his desk chair to face Will. “You mustn't be too hard on us, Will; it's difficult to realize that someone I used to _babysit_ \-- in this very office, I might add-- is now a grown man with a mind of his own.”

“Babysit, my ass! I was shadowing you at work, for school assignments.”

“You did that _once;_ the other times, I assure you, it was babysitting,” Harold said with his lips twitching slightly. “Anyway... it'll be hard for your parents too, to realize you're not their boy anymore.”

Will made a noise that was half-a-groan, half-a-laugh. “You _don't_ need to tell me that.”

“Yes, well. Just try and be patient with these old people, alright?”

“Uh-huh.” Will's index finger tinked against the brass, green-on-gold. Harold absently copied the gesture with his own finger, against his pen.

“Have you... thought about telling your parents?”

Will's eyes darted back to his face, sharp, then deliberately returned to the sextant. “No.”

Harold made a small, sympathetic grimace. “Not even-- not even your mother?”

Will huffed a sigh, then lifted finger and thumb to his ear to mime a phone call. “ 'Hey Mom, classes are going fine, did good on exam, oh and you know Christie who I was talking about last month and you were teasing me about how your Future Grandkids would all be supermodels, yeah her? Sooo I'm bi, so don't hold your breath.' Yeah, that'll go _great_.”

“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, Will,” Harold murmured. “If-- if you're serious about this being a part of your life, about it being part of _who you are--_ don't you think you'll want your parents to know about that some day?”

Will frowned down at the desk, expression distant. “...yeah,” he said after a bit, fingers back to tracing the lines of the nautical instrument. “Someday. Maybe. But not... not anytime soon, okay?”

“I'm not going to _tell_ on you,” Harold assured him. “It's very bad form to out somebody. Just-- think about it.”

“Aye aye, cap'n,” said Will with his grin intact once more, and flipped a mock salute. Harold snorted.

The green-painted nails retreated from the sextant, and Will jammed his hands into his pockets. “So when did you tell _your_ parents?”

…

….oh, now, that really was dirty pool. Unfair. Harold opened his mouth. Shut it again. Took a deep breath and studied the ceiling of his office.

“It was a very different era, Will--”

“So you've never told them?”

Harold rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “Not in so many words.”

No. No, he'd just run away instead. Why was he having this conversation? Perhaps it was karma telling him that people who lived in houses of lies shouldn't throw bricks labeled 'honesty'. “--and before you decide to be a smartass and say I should _think about it_ , they're both dead, so it's a bit late for that.”

“...oh. Um. ...sorry.”

Harold shook his head. “No, it's alright. But if anything, Will-- take my advice as coming from someone who knows what it's like to _not_ have your family know things about you. Yes?”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay.” Will studied the carpet pensively for a few seconds, his face only half-visible under the fall of his hair. Harold watched him take a breath, then go up onto his toes and then back down again.

“I gotta run. But-- I wanted to say thanks, you know? It-- it means a lot to me that you got me--” he jerked his chin down at his hidden hands. “I mean, I guess that's stupid, because it's such a small thing. But that you're okay with it, and not saying I shouldn't wear it _,_ or anything like that.”

Harold found a smile again, slipped it on. “Of course, Will,” he said softly.

And this time he should have been expecting it-- _once bitten, twice shy_ \-- but he wasn't, and Will leaned down with the grace of youth, stole another kiss, lips brushing lips and warm breath that smelled of cinnamon chewing gum--

And Harold was pulling back, but Will was ahead of him-- contact already broken, Will watching him with eyes sparkling, and then sauntering off towards the door, throwing over his shoulder, “It's just a kiss, don't freak, Harold,” while the frayed hems of his jeans dragged the office carpet.

It took him a long time to get back to work.


	4. 2001: March ('then you should say what you mean,' the march hare went on)

February became March. Rain marked the windows: the windows of IFT, Nathan's floor-to-ceiling ones and the ones three cubicles removed from his own; the windows of Universal Heritage Insurance; the windows of the big house in the country and the apartment in the city where the son of a rich man lived. Rain necessitated umbrellas, the wiping of feet, the seeking of shelter. Rain turned the view of the streets into a swarm of black beetles, jamming at subway entrances and fighting over taxis.

Harold stared down at the city, a child's sodden toy thirty stories below. Nathan's office had a good view.

“The editors over at PC Mag tell me that unless someone comes out with something mindblowing in the next nine months, Raven 7's a lock for their OS of the Year.”

He processed Nathan's words distantly. Taxis were yellow (or white, or blue, or green-- but most often yellow) blobs down on the water-black streets, spots of relative brightness. From this height one could not see the rainbow sheen of oil on the water running into the gutters, but Harold imagined it, envisioned it lending a colorful patina of pollution to everything. Like sunsets. Sulfuric acid aerosol particles made for brilliant crimson skies...

“Harry?”

Nathan's reflection was looking up from his desk towards him, a distorted, rain-running ghost in the glass. “Yes?”

“Raven, OS of the Year? Congrats?”

“Right.”

He turned from the view of the city. Nathan dropped into his executive chair, causing the springs to creak with their sudden responsibility. Nathan laced large hands across his stomach and gave him a wry smile.

“I guess you never really have cared about the recognition so much, have you? Well, how's this then: we've got three million _pre_ -orders for hospitals, schools... support keeps telling me they get e-mails asking every week if Raven's ever going to be available to the home consumer. Projected sales for a home version would be, oh... about the GDP of _Honduras_.”

Harold eased himself, more carefully, down into the couch that lurked against the office's far wall. “That's good.”

Nathan stared at him, brows frozen halfway up to his hair. _“_ That's good? _That's good?_ Should I come over there and take your temperature, Harry?”

He dragged the rest of his mind back to the conversation at hand. He took off his glasses and pushed his head back into the white leather of the sofa. “Sorry. I was a million miles away.”

“I could tell,” Nathan answered, dropping the chair forward again and crossing his arms on his desk. “You've been preoccupied for a week. Something on your mind?”

And that _was_ the million-dollar question, wasn't it. Harold bit back on a helpless laugh, his eyes charting the blurry landscape of the ceiling.

 _Yes, Nathan; your son's been flirting with me for the better part of a month. What should I do about that?_ Couldn't exactly go saying that. Although it was morbidly tempting, just to imagine the look on Nathan's face.

And there was no other word for it: since that visit to his office back in February, Will had been _flirting._

Text messages to his phone-- nothing inappropriate, exactly, nothing he could feel justified in sitting down to have a Necessary Talk with Will about-- just-- teasing. That damn word again.

 

> **Wearng polish 4 date, thx again ;)**

or

 

> **meeting guy 2nite, joel warner-- anything i shd no about him? meet ur standards? :P**

Texts. Multiple texts. He had deleted each one as it came in, and not responded to them-- what on earth was he supposed to say?

Then there was the picture, which he hadn't deleted.

It had come to his work e-mail address for Wren, of all places (and he'd never given that to Will, so how had Will gotten it? Had he asked Nathan? The paranoid questions had circled around each other like hungry dogs); a picture of Will taken by someone else ( _who?_ ), Will in a club, shoddy quality and shoddy lighting but Will was laughing, hand raised around a beer and his nails green and his arm slung around another young man's shoulder who was only half in the picture--

He'd jumped in his damn chair when the e-mail had loaded, and actually _looked over his shoulder_ to make sure nobody was behind him. There was nothing naughty about it, it was simply a picture of a young man laughing in a bar with friends; out of context it was entirely innocent but-- but there _was_ context, and the context was preying on his mind like cancer.

What was the saying? _A guilty conscience needs no accuser_.

And he hadn't deleted it.

He'd hurriedly closed the window, but that wasn't the same thing as deleting. And later, out of the office, at home-- he'd logged in and opened it back up and let the not-terribly-good picture fill the screen, 1600 x 1200. A two megapixel camera in his opinion. Will probably had such a camera, or one of his young friends, or...

The background, and the white of Will's smile, were blurry; the angle crooked.

And Will-- Will with his hair mussed and his cheeks scruffy and his smile bright and thoughtless and probably a little buzzed, Will with his leather jacket shining softly in bar lighting, Will with his nails green around the glass and his skin flushed, Will looking off to the side and caught in this candid moment--

\--Will was lovely.

His cursor had hovered over **X-DELETE** , hovered and hovered and had ultimately not clicked.

Now, Harold Wren forced himself to look from the ceiling of Nathan's office to Nathan's concerned face. In the fall of Nathan's hair and the planes of his jaw he could see the resemblance, the bits of Nathan that had carried over into his son.

There had a been a time, thirty years ago, when he'd lost sleep over Nathan Ingram. And didn't _that_ make him feel good about himself now, make it that much worse, that much more pathetic and terrible?

“I just haven't been sleeping well lately,” he said aloud. Lied aloud. He was good at that. “I think I might be coming down with something.”

Nathan's look was sympathetic, as he leaned his tall frame back into the chair once more. “It's going around, yeah. You can't be too careful. Maybe take a few days off?”

“Maybe,” Harold said, and looked away from blond hair back to the window, to the rain that got everything wet and drew the city's pollution down into the ground water with it.

****

There was an explanation for this, he supposed: Will was, in his way, exploring what he could do-- testing boundaries, discovering himself, insert-buzzword-here-- with the safest, most innocuous target possible: his 'uncle Harold', with whom it couldn't be serious, couldn't be taken the wrong way, couldn't ever _be_ anything at all.

Who better to flirt safely with than someone who wouldn't return it?

All well and good as far as Will was concerned. If Harold hadn't been affected by it, he would have just _let_ Will do it-- he would have laughed it off, shaken his head wryly at Will's texts and his pictures as Will no doubt thought he was doing and-- and that would have been that--

But it _was_ affecting him. Shameful, that. At the most inopportune moments he would find himself remembering-- a slender but toned body in a thin shirt, the touch of cherry-flavored lips against his own-- and while he could delete texts with the press of a button, his mental hard drive was a harder thing to manage.

It had to stop.

He was at home (one of his homes), staring again at the damned picture while the kettle worked up to a whistle in the kitchen. He reached for his phone, and then thought the better of it-- he didn't trust his voice-- so he clicked over to a reply instead.

 

> To: [matchbox204lyfe@aol.com](mailto:matchbox204lyfe@aol.com)
> 
> From: [h.wren@uhi.com](mailto:h.wren@uhi.com)
> 
> Subj: [ RE: HEY CHECK THIS OUT HAROLD :) ]
> 
> Will,
> 
> Are you free tomorrow? I'd like to talk to you if you don't have class.

He paused in his typing, stared at the glowing screen of his laptop and the letters on it. It was easier to analyze Will's e-mail address than think about what else he should say. 'Match box two-oh-four'? And _AOL?_ Really? He felt the cringe he might have if Will had said he was going to join the Church of Scientology. He was halfway through typing a line about different ISPs Will might consider before remembering that as far as Will was concerned, his Uncle Harold was only basically literate with computers.

Backspace, backspace, backspace. Harold stared at his blinking cursor.

 

> I can meet whenever is convenient for you. Perhaps Central Park? Or on campus if that works for you. Just let me know.
> 
> -Harold

A public place, a neutral place. Not his office and not Will's apartment (God, no). Somewhere with people around.

The kettle started to whistle. Harold hit _send,_ and then, lips pressed firmly together, he hit _delete_ as well.

Will's laughing face flickered and then vanished, deleted and gone. His Wren inbox returned to its usual boring corporate e-mails, newsletters, memos regarding conferences and stocks. He got up to go fix his tea, feeling better than he had in days.

****

Will hadn't brought an umbrella. Of course he hadn't.

Harold stared glumly at Will, who was darting up to him on the sidewalk with his jacket held over his head and a grin not the least bit impeded by the rain. Will skidded to a stop under the shelter of Harold's own umbrella and shrugged down his denim jacket. Harold lifted the umbrella a fraction, as Will was two inches taller than he himself.

“Hey, Harold!”

“Will.” Will wasn't wearing nailpolish today. Harold supposed he should be grateful for small mercies... if not for the persistent drizzle that March was inflicting on them. It had been clear when he'd left the house. Of course it had been. Why on earth had he selected the park?

“Do you want to go inside?” Harold asked, with a nod of his chin towards the entrance of the American Museum of Natural History.

Will shrugged. “I don't mind this. It's not really coming down hard or anything. I got _soaked_ yesterday going to class.”

“Don't you have a--” Harold shut his mouth with a click and sighed.

There were people around, although not as many as Harold had been thinking when he'd issued his invitation. The rain was driving people inside, or, at least, encouraging them not to linger as they moved from point A to point B. The park's colors were a dull palette of browns and grays, with the first tentative greens muted by the drizzling rains.

“So what's up?” Will asked. There were fine, precise droplets of rain beaded in his perpetually-messy hair. Harold looked away.

“Let's walk a bit,” he suggested, because words were hard, talking was hard, people were hard.

“Okay,” Will said, and they crossed the street from the museum and headed into the park.

The wet footpaths glistened underfoot. The bare branches of the trees did nothing to stop the drizzle. Harold flicked sidelong glances at Will with his hands bare, and only that denim jacket, and no hat, and wondered if youth made one categorically immune to cold and wet.

If so, he had never been young. Winters at MIT had found him bundled in scarf and coat and gloves, every bit of body heat sealed in with tucks of fabric. His coat today was a wool affair, his gloves black calfskin. He still felt chilled.

“How are classes?” he asked, to buy time.

There was a buoyancy to Will's stride when he moved, and that too made Harold feel old to see. The blond head bobbed in a good-natured shrug at the question. “Chem's fine. A&P's kind of a bitch. So much memorization. But I got a ninety-two on the last test so I'm not too worried.”

“That's good,” Harold said, his breath fogging slightly in the air before them. “And Physics? You said you were wrestling with that...”

“Just the math,” Will said with a grimace. “Could be better.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Hey, is that a squirrel?”

“By how much better?”

Will shot him an aggrieved look. “...I've got a C right now.”

“Tsk.”

“I'll make it up on the final.”

“You'd better, or Nathan will have things to say.”

“He always has things to say.”

Harold let it go. The path led in a curve around one of the many ponds, the surface pocked with raindrops. Ducks huddled on the shore, under benches, under bushes, tucked their wings over themselves to shelter from the rain.

“Those are mallards, right?” Will asked, squinting through the drizzle; Harold nodded. “I thought they went south in winter?”

“Only if they can't reach food,” Harold said with a little shake of his head. “As long as the water doesn't freeze over, the ducks can reach the plants they need to eat. Most of the birds in the park stay here year-round for that reason.”

“Huh. Cool. Didn't know that.”

“Yes, well, the minutiae of ornithology aren't exactly riveting to most people your age,” Harold said, coming to a stop behind one of the benches. He thought it made a good segue. Will's age, his age, this nonsense that had gone on long enough-- that he'd _let_ go on long enough...

Will shot him a sidelong glance in their small, dry space beneath the umbrella. “Well. _I_ think it's cool. We get ducks all year. That's neat. And it's neat you know stuff like that.”

He smiled perfunctorily. “It's kind of you to say so.”

“No,” said Will, shaking his head, making his hair fall once more in his eyes. He tossed it back. “It is. Okay? It's _neat_ that you know every damn weird, useless fact about birds that I have ever heard, it's _neat_ that you ask me how my classes are going and that you actually remember shit I've told you before about how they're going.”

He blinked, caught off-guard by the sudden fierceness in Will's tone. Will stepped forward, and he stepped back, caught between Will and the bench, the umbrella's handle held between them like a barrier.

“Harold--” And Will took another step, and now there was nowhere to step back to. Will raised a hand (fingers red with cold) to touch his own gloved hand where it was tightly gripping the umbrella. Will's other hand came up too, bare fingers questing towards his face.

He jerked his hand back. The spokes of the umbrella caught Will in the back of the head, which hadn't been the intent. He said, “Will, _stop it,”_ in the same second that Will said, “Ow!”

They stood there a second. Harold was shocked to find he was breathing hard. Will stood outside the protective circle of the umbrella, giving him a _look_ and rubbing at the back of his head.

“Will,” Harold said, steam coming in little pants in front of his face. The hand not holding the umbrella gripped for the back of the bench-- stone, steady, solid. “ _Will._ You-- you need to stop this. Please.”

Will looked-- resigned. He dropped his hand from his hair, wiped the first raindrops from his face. “Yeah. I figured that was what you were getting up the balls to say,” he said, and resigned or not, there was dull bitterness in his tone.

Harold shook his head helplessly. “What else am I _supposed_ to say, Will? Keep it up?” His voice sounded more strident than he liked, words tumbling too quick over each other. He curled his gloved fingers around the bench. Deep breath. “Keep flirting with me, like, like a boy with a crush? You can't, Will. You _can't.”_

“It's such a sin, to get something to smile about in your email occasionally?” Will retorted, shoving his hands down into his jacket pockets and turning his face up to the dripping sky. Harold thought it might be to keep him from seeing Will's expression; if so, it was successful. All he could see was the hint of Will's clenching jaw, and his working throat. “Every now and then to have someone say something nice about you? What is so damn dangerous about that?”

He shook his head again. He closed his eyes. When he opened them Will was still there, young and angry and impossible. “Will,” he said in half-a-plea. “I realize-- I realize it all seems like harmless fun to you. I'm sorry I can't go along with the joke, I am, but please-- please, stop teasing me.”

Will's head snapped back down, eyes wide and dark, expressive brows furrowing above them. “You think this is a joke?”

 _It has to be, for both our sakes._ Harold slid his hand along the stone of the bench seeking a better grip, his eyes darting along the path, among the ducks, seeking other people, seeking rescue from this conversation. The path was empty. The ducks were no help at all.

Will stepped back in again before he could formulate a reply-- stepped back in, close, until Will was right in front of him, close enough he could feel Will's breath warm on his face. Will's voice dropped to a whisper, hoarse. “You think I'm _teasing?”_

It was too much. “Of course you are!” Harold snapped in answer, hand flying from the bench to ineffectually shove Will in the chest-- or not so ineffectually, for the blow knocked Will back two steps. It might have been surprise as much as anything. “Just _stop it!_ Stop with the e-emails, stop with the texts, stop with the damn _kisses!_ Do you have any idea how--”

He cut himself off with a shark sideways jerk of his head. Will stood there a moment, hands at his sides. They were both breathing hard, now. How had that happened? Will's cheeks were red; his breath was white.

“How what?” he asked, when Harold didn't continue.

He shook his head. Will's eyes were fixed on him, huge, dark. “How _what?”_

“How your father would react,” Harold spat out, and Will's hands clenched into fists.

“That's not what you were going to say.”

“It doesn't matter,” Harold said, and again his voice was too shrill, discordant like a bird's call of alarm. “It doesn't _matter,_ Will, you're going to stop and we're going to forget about it, do you understand?”

“No.”

“Dammit, Will!” He smacked the bench, since Will was out of range. “What do you _want_ from me?”

“For starters? The end of that sentence.”

How could one boy-- man-- be so stubborn? How could he, Harold, not simply walk away from this conversation? He'd always had a hard time saying _no_ to Will, but this wasn't childhood, this wasn't ice cream or a new toy, this was something altogether different, and terrifying.

“Not going to happen,” he bit out. The umbrella bobbed with every terse word, the inner nylon bumping the top of his head and smashing his hair down. He'd lowered it at some point, not realizing it, and now it made a defensive shell with the spokes pointed out like weapons.

“Then I'll finish it for you,” Will threatened, and for the third time stepped closer. He ducked under the umbrella's edge. His eyes were still large, but filled with a dawning realization; Harold jerked his head to the side to avoid looking Will in the face.

“Will.”

“I think you were going to say--”

“ _Will--”_

Will's hands settled, not on him, but to either side of him, holding the bench, trapping him in the circle formed by stone and body. He stood straight as possible to keep from touching those arms. Will's voice held a strange, tight wonder when he breathed, “--how much it gets under your skin. Because you-- because you like it. 'm I right?”

“Will,” Harold said a third time, a helpless whisper, and he squeezed his eyes shut, because no matter where he looked Will was still there in his peripheral vision. “Don't.”

“Tell me I've got it wrong then. Tell me and I'll never bring it up again.”

The raindrops were hitting the top of the umbrella, tapping at the nylon with hollow noises. He could feel Will's breath on his face again, coming in little shudders. (Cinnamon chewing gum--)

“Fine. You've got it wrong.”

“Look at me and tell me that, dammit!” Will said, and his voice was as hoarse as Harold's own.

He opened his eyes. It was a mistake; Will's face was inches from his own and Will's eyes were treacherously bright, catching and holding every bit of gray March light. He looked on the verge of tears, which made him seem so awfully, terribly young. Harold opened his mouth to lie.

It was easy to lie. He'd done it to Nathan just the day before. He'd done it to Will a hundred times in Will's life if he'd done it once. He'd been lying since he was a fifteen-year-old runaway and had left the name of his birth, the name of his father, behind to be a small and inconspicuous bird whom nobody would ever notice. It was easy to lie, and he was good at it.

It wouldn't come. Will's eyes held him whole.

His mouth betrayed him, opening and shutting on nothing, nothing again, so he tried his hands-- push Will away, push those arms off the bench so he could step out and escape. That was the plan. Except his one hand was still holding the goddamned umbrella, and his other betrayed him too: it turned a push into a grab, his gloved hand clutching at Will's forearm through the rain-damp denim of his jacket.

“Will, stop it,” Harold whispered, while his hand fumbled up the length of Will's arm and over his shoulder and all the way to Will's face, warm even through the leather, and Will's jaw fit so perfect and heavy in the palm of his hand.

The rain made temblors in the water of the pond and Harold wondered if his fingers really caused it, quivering against a paper coffee-cup, quivering against Will's cheek. “You've got to stop it,” he said again, broken, but Will shoved the umbrella to one side and leaned in and pressed his mouth to Harold's.

And this time his lips stayed, stayed until he had to acknowledge them. Will's mouth was warm; the tip of his nose was cold, where it pressed into Harold's cheek. Will's lips were soft and his scruffy not-quite-beard prickled against Harold's chin and jaw.

Will was warm. Will was warm, except where he wasn't, except the tip of his nose and the cold-reddened hands he raised, trembling, to the sides of Harold's face. He was conscious of every detail, from the damp strands of Will's hair against his glasses to the minute flakes of stone from the bench that were pressed against his cheekbones by the palms of Will's hands.

The rain tattooed hollow sounds upon the drum of the umbrella, and Harold closed his eyes with a shudder and let his lips give and soften under Will's.

It was, as kisses went, a chaste kiss-- neither of them opened their mouths, neither of them pressed body to body. A dizzy part of Harold's mind wondered if it were chaste to make up for the innate and inherent indecency of it. He couldn't have said which of them pulled away first, only that Will's face was flushed, his breath puffing white in the strange bubble universe of the umbrella's dome. That air was scarce for himself as well.

Will's hands dropped like stones but not far; from his face to the thick shoulders and lapels of his coat, fingers clutching at the gray wool. “You want me,” he said, voice still holding that note of strained wonder.

Hell. Hell. Damn it. Harold took deep breaths, trying to think. His glasses were fogging. He pulled his hand back from Will's face to yank them off, and nearly dropped them down into the muddy ground in the process. “What I--”

He cleared his throat. Try again. “--what I _want_ doesn't matter, Will,” he said, words tripping over each other in his rush. “We can't do this.”

Will looked at him from miles away. Like he were speaking a foreign language, like he'd sprouted a second head. Oh, God _save_ him from goddamned _Ingrams_ and their knowledge that the universe belonged to them!

“Why not?” Will asked, as if were that goddamned _simple,_ and Harold experienced a strong desire to push him into the pond.

“What do you mean, _why not?”_ he snapped. “Why-do-you- _think_ not-- William, do I have to _list_ the ways this is the worst-- the worst idea I could possibly--”

The enormity of it shut him up. Harold fumbled his glasses back on, his fingers thick and clumsy in his gloves. He was getting damn tired of holding the umbrella up. He ran his shaking hand through his hair, and tugged his coat free of Will's clutching hands with a jerk of effort.

He took three steps-- satisfying steps, feet hitting the ground hard in a stomp against the mud-- and stopped, because where was he going? Where the hell was he going? He wheeled on Will, who stood by the bench getting wet once more without the umbrella's cover.

Will gazed at him like a statue. “Harold,” he said, “why doesn't what you want matter?”

He stared, slack-jawed, until the cold made him shut his mouth with a click. This wasn't happening. This wasn't-- in the rain, standing in mud, with the memory of Will's mouth on his own warring with a helpless anger as to which could do a better job keeping him warm-- this wasn't _happening._ Except that Will was still there. Looking at him.

“Because-- because I have a responsibility to you, Will, I am _already somebody to you,_ and the person I am to you is not-- is not _this.”_

“And people never change? People stay in the same role their entire life?” Will asked. Oh, to be twenty-one and have a perfect understanding of the universe again, Harold thought bitterly.

There was irony here, somewhere, deep and cosmic, as brutal as Will turning his question about parents back upon him once before. Harold played roles, wore skins, slid from false name to false name. He knew better than anybody the mutability of roles.

When he said nothing Will shook his head a little and wiped rain from from his face with his sleeve.

“You-- Harold, you... all my _life,_ you've been around, like _his_ sidekick or something.

“He goes to Europe, and he's on the covers of _Wired,_ and _Forbes,_ and you work in-- in freakin' _insurance_ , Jesus. Dad is-- fuck, I don't know, he's Louis the Fourteenth or something, and nobody even _looks_ at you and I don't get why you live like that, why you _want_ to, because there's more to you--

“Sometimes you screw up, you know? Sometimes you forget, you let it slip, and I see it, like that night at the club with Derek, where you become somebody _totally else_ and-- and I don't know what the fuck my dad did to you that you feel you have to live in his shadow for the rest of your life--”

Harold was once more rendered speechless. His mouth hung open with, fog of his breath hanging in the air between them. Which was worse? Will's perception, his eyes picking up on all the things one thought a child wasn't old enough to understand (or a young man too self-absorbed to see)-- or how amazingly wrong all the conclusions Will had drawn from his glimpses of half-truths?

They'd woven a lie, he and Nathan, a good and a fine one to the world, but never considered how the lie might read to someone close enough to see it every day.

“...Will, it isn't like that,” he began, and droplets of water shivered off the umbrella with the tremble of his hand and arms.

Will shook his head. His hair and his jacket were darkening with the rain. He jammed his hands down into his pockets. “So _tell me_ what it's like.”

He shifted the umbrella one hand to another and gripped it tight, tight enough he could feel the handle digging in through the leather of his glove. What explanation would suffice? How many misconceptions could he safely correct, and which should be left to languish? What was the minimum that might satisfy Will, and what truths were expendable?

He took too long, thinking over his plan of attack.

“Jesus Christ, do you calculate the hell out of _everything_ you say? Everything you _do?”_ Will yelled, his breath puffing the air white in staccato bursts.

 _Yes._ (Yes, always, yes.)

A jogger came around the curve of the path, someone in leggings and sweatshirt and an orange beanie, head tucked to chest. Harold shut his mouth, eyes darting from the jogger to Will. For a moment it seemed Will might not care, might indeed carry on just _because_ someone else was there, Will's emotions too high to care for propriety. He saw Will's eyes hands ball into fists in his pockets, but then he shut his mouth as well.

They stood in forced, artificial silence while the jogger huffed and puffed on the section of the path that cut by the pond, the bench, the ducks. There was water on Will's face. The words were on the tip of his tongue, automatic and reflexive: _get under the umbrella, you're going to catch cold,_ words he'd said God knew how many times in some form or another ( _where's your coat, get inside, have you eaten?_ ) all Will's life.

Meanings changed. Contexts changed. Ten minutes was enough to make such words dangerous, to make them an invitation for proximity.

The jogger never so much as looked their way. The sound of shoes hitting the pavement persisted after the runner was gone into the trees again, then that faded too.

He braced for more yelling, but Will only looked at him.

“Take the umbrella,” he said after ten seconds, tongue thick in his mouth.

“Why?”

Why? _Why?_ Was this childhood again after all? _Why is the sky blue, uncle Harold?_

“Because you're getting _wet!”_

“ _So what?”_ Will said, and ah yes, there was the yell. Will's eyes flashed with an emotion too complex to call anger. “Harold, it's _water_.”

Will jerked his hands from his pockets and spread his arms wide, turned his face up to the miserable March sky. His voice rang across the pond, echoed off the bare trunks of the trees. “NEW YORK! Hey New York! Shit! I'm getting rained on! I'm melting, oh no! Except that I'm _not,_ because it's _just water,_ Harold, it's not lethal for Chrissake!”

“Would you--” No, no. Too loud. He forced himself to breathe, and then to drop his voice so it wasn't rising to match Will's. “Would you _stop yelling_?”

Will dropped his head down again to look at him, attacking him with a reckless white smile. “Or what? Someone will _hear_? Jesus, don't you ever get _tired_ of living with the mute button on?”

Will grabbed hold of the back of the bench and hopped over it, so that he was standing on the seat, the rubber soles of his sneakers squeaking on the wet stone. He stared down at Harold, the edged smile splitting his face. “Go on, tell me to get down before I break my neck!”

Harold grit his teeth. “Stop it. Stop this, you're acting like--”

“--a _child?”_ Will laughed. “Not half as much as you're acting like a parent.”

“God _dammit_ , Will, that's _what I am_ to you!” Harold answered, and it was satisfying, satisfying to yell, to trade shout for shout, to let himself be angry and to hear the echo of his own words over the water.

Will's smile went away. He spread his hands again, no broad gesture but a shrug of empty palms. His eyes looked down from infinite heights, dark and watchful as the pigeons of the park. “Sure. That's what's safe, isn't it? Keep it like that. Keep _repeating_ it until you forget you want anything else, that you--” (and Will's breath hitched, a stutter of fog in front of his face) “--that you could _have_ anything else--”

He wasn't listening to this. He couldn't. He turned around, shoes twisting in the muddy earth, and moved for the footpath.

Will's voice battered at his shoulders as he walked away, and he could see it in his head without looking-- Will standing on the bench, hands cupped around his mouth to yell: _“Maybe someday you should go outside without a fucking umbrella, just to see what it feels like!”_

****

He invented a business trip to Los Angeles for Harold Wren, gave his secretary at UHI the phone number of a California hotel that would reroute to his phone if necessary. Nathan had already given him the excuse regarding his role at IFT-- he coughed on the phone with his immediate supervisor, claimed a few of his rarely-touched sick days. For a moment he was taken back to childhood, to feigning sickness and forging his mother's signature on notes from home.

Most of his other selves required less maintenance, and therefore less in the way of excuses, when he wanted to vanish.

Harold retreated to his favorite house.

He buried himself in coding for eleven hours, one of the back-burner projects for which there was never enough time, fine-tuning the logarithmic amplifiers on a piece of speech recognition software he'd been toying with for the better part of six months. He lost himself in the science of sound, in the nuances of audio and distortion. That this necessitated noise-canceling headphones was purely incidental, of course.

Yet when he eventually checked his phone, there were no messages. No calls. No texts.

He turned the phone over in his hands. Relief, that was what he was feeling-- relief that Will hadn't contacted him to say anything at all. Of course it was relief. What else could it be?

It was dark out the drawn curtains of his study, the day lost in the jagged lines of waveforms equalizing on his screen. Harold turned on the lights, and sat in his chair with his cellphone in one hand and his glasses in the other, dangling from the earpiece he held between thumb and forefinger.

He'd been working for hours and hours. He should eat something. There were sandwich makings in the fridge. Or leftover Thai, for that matter. That'd do. He could microwave the coconut curry rice and the shrimp Pad Thai, and have some tea, and get back to work.

He'd just check his e-mail first...

Harold used a total of thirty e-mail addresses on a semi-regular basis, with hundreds more, on a dozen servers, created for various purposes. The inbox where most of the messages forwarded had forty-three e-mails requiring his attention, and Harold held his breath as he scrolled down through the list, past messages addressed to different versions of himself.

Nothing from Will. No pictures, no problematic words. He exhaled, and let himself slump back into the chair. Shoulders pressed back into it and his eyes shut. Only because they hurt from hours of the screen, of course. Only because of that.

His hands rested on the black leather of the armrests of his executive, ergonomic, expensive chair. He pressed his palms flush against the smooth-slick grain, feeling the leather give at his touch.

He sat there remembering the weight of Will's jaw against his palm, through his glove; the rasp of a denim jacket when he'd gripped it; the play of bar lighting on a brown leather jacket in a grainy picture.

In hindsight, he supposed-- if one were honest, honest about one's own gestures and motivations and knowledge-- he ought to have deleted it rather more thoroughly. Because it didn't take more than three clicks to be into his e-mail's trash bin and there it was, and three clicks was nothing near enough to help one make good choices. One needed more than three clicks as a barrier to temptation.

Will's face laughed from the screen, eyes not on the camera but glancing to the side, away, away, which meant he could look as long as he liked.

After several minutes, he navigated to a search engine and started looking up Joel Warner.

****

“Maybe you should take a week off more often,” Nathan said, glancing over the printouts Harold had brought to their lunch meeting. Nathan shook his head slightly, appreciative. “This is cleaner than anything else on the market right now. A lot cleaner.”

Harold accepted the compliment with a small smile, a flutter of his fingers before taking a sip from his wine glass. “Well. Every now and then it's good to get out of the office, I suppose.”

“It's good stuff, Harry,” Nathan said, flipping through the pages and chewing absently on his thumb. Nathan's eyes flicked to his over the top of the papers, over Nathan's seared merlu and salad and his own lunch wine. “Can I show this to R&D yet?”

“Oh-- what, you think this has applications as its own project?” Harold protested. “At best it's a few patents for the loss eradication-- I'd need to work on a syntax parser before it'd be an actual product, and this isn't really much compared to our other irons in the fire.”

Despite his demurrals, there was a flush of pleasure he'd almost forgotten. Back at MIT, he'd routinely awed Nathan with his programming prowess, his innovations; the last few years they had settled into the stride of the known. It had been a little while since he'd shown Nathan something _new;_ a little while since Nathan had given him that look that spoke wordlessly of the other man's admiration for his skills.

It still felt good, after all these years. Strokes to the ego. Harold plucked a morsel of mussel from his pasta.

Nathan set the papers down on the chair they weren't using, folded his hands above his plate. “Kicked your bout of malaise, then?”

He didn't hesitate, didn't blink. “Yes, thank you. Have I missed anything at the company?”

Nathan's shoulders rose beneath his suit in a shrug. “Nothing you haven't seen the e-mails for. Don't worry, IFT hasn't burned down yet for lack of your presence.”

“Ha ha,” Harold said, and toyed with the stem of his wine glass.

They were at a good, somewhat-secluded table in what was already a good restaurant-- of course they were, _Nathan Ingram_ and friend. They were seated before a large window full of washed-out March sky, not proper sunlight but an ambient gray glow.

Nathan Ingram looked best in summer sunlight, but he was still a handsome man in March. Strong jaw and nose, perfect hair, lively eyes and expressive mouth... There was a time when Harold would have sat at a table with Nathan in a delicately balanced misery, caught on the horns of an unrequited and unspoken want that struggled not to destroy an existing friendship.

It had faded. In his twenties, it had cut; in his thirties it had become a bittersweet pang, twisted to something softer by seeing Nathan's genuine joy with his wife, with his son. How could he have begrudged his friend that simple pleasure of a family life? You didn't choose who you loved. You didn't choose what gender you were attracted to, either.

By forty it no longer hurt. And by forty-seven it was something that could make him smile, distantly, nostalgia for the crush of an era you could pretend was as distant as childhood.

 _Except when you see shades of Nathan in Will,_ said his treacherous little back-brain, and Harold's smile, aimed into his glass of sauvignon blanc, faded.

Not thinking about that. He took a swallow from his glass, a swallow, not a sip, darted a look at Nathan to see if he'd noticed (he hadn't), and took up his fork again.

“Give me a couple of months to work on the parser,” he said as he attacked his pasta, “and then we'll talk about a product.”

“Alright,” Nathan said with a smirk. “Kick Dragon's ass out of the top of the speech-rec market. We could call it _Parrot,_ that's up your alley.”

He snorted despite himself and shot Nathan a look. “Budgerigar would be more apt, but makes a terrible name. Myna, perhaps.”

“Mockingbird probably isn't terribly nice,” Nathan counter-suggested with his brows arching, and this time Harold did laugh. He shook his head. Nathan's phone rang. With a perfunctory look of apology (and a glance to make sure the waiter wasn't about to stab him for this), Nathan picked it up.

Harold leaned back in his seat and studied the rest of his food with deep consideration while Nathan solved whatever crisis was happening at the office. He shouldn't have ordered so much. Especially with the restaurant's crème brulee. Perhaps he should stop now. He glanced around for their waiter, intending to let him know they were ready for dessert.

“--sure, Will. I'm at Le Cirque, catching lunch with Harry. You eaten?”

He froze-- a half-second, nothing too betraying. He made his hand move again to his wineglass and collect it for another sip. He watched Nathan.

“Well, swing on by then, we're in no rush. Mmhm. Okay, see you soon.”

Dammit. Dammit. Harold was out of wine. He collected the bottle from Nathan's side of the table and refilled his glass while Nathan set his phone down.

“Will's joining us?” (Oh, good, his voice was completely casual.) Nathan nodded and picked up his silverware again, and Harold stared fixedly at the wine filling his glass.

“Well, I don't want to interrupt any father and son time,” he said after returning the bottle to the table. “And I should be getting back to the office anyway, so I'll let you two--”

“Don't be ridiculous,” Nathan scoffed, and Harold swore in the privacy of his own head. He sagged in his seat, tugging his glass closer by means of one finger hooked around the stem, while Nathan dug into his food again. “You haven't been by the house since Will's party, I'm sure he'd like to see you too.”

 _Damn_ it. Harold gazed at his wine with the beginnings of panic. Think. Think.

Nathan returned to talking. The speech-recognition program again. He nodded vaguely and made the appropriate noises of listening, while pondering methods to leave the table.

Fake a heart attack. Remember an important phone call he had to make. No, better yet, remember the phone call he had to make, and then _make_ the call, but to one of his computers to set it to auto-call him back in, what, fifteen minutes? No, ten--so that he could answer it and then plead that the phone call was some sort of crisis and excuse himself to go deal with it. Yes. Okay. That was actually workable.

Alright, that was Plan A.

He was on Plan D when Will materialized next to the table, far sooner than he'd expected. Before he'd made his first call to set up his escape, at that.

“Will, that was quick,” said Nathan, and got to his feet to give his son one of those one-armed manly not-quite-a-hugs they apparently produced in Texas.

“Hey Dad,” said Will with all apparent enthusiasm. “Yeah, I was over at Grand Central. Not far. How's your day? Hey, Harold.”

“Hello, Will,” he said, and Nathan was pushing out the chair for Will to sit, and this saved him from the question of whether he should stand, whether he should risk the casual hug or not, whether it would look strange to Nathan if he did not.

Will was wearing a suit jacket-- a bit too large for him, because it wasn't his, of course; one of the loaner jackets Le Cirque kept for those too barbarous to show up in accordance with their dress code. Will stood there, smiling, in sunglasses and a borrowed jacket and his own designer denim and with his blond hair doing some sort of ridiculous, artfully-disheveled whipped-cream thing atop his head.

Will took the chair, dropping down into it all lanky limbs and violation of decorum, whether or not he was wearing a jacket. Harold slid his plate to the side of the table, and let Ingrams, father and son, talk at each other. They were good at that.

The waiter came and whisked away his own plate; Will said he didn't need lunch but would just eat dessert with them. Three crème brulees then, sirs? Very good, sirs...

With his dish gone there was nothing to do but toy with the stem of his wine glass, and have another sip, and another, as he pretended he wasn't watching Will.

Will still had his sunglasses on, which raised distant alarm bells. Nathan was telling some probably-hilarious story about some mishap he'd had on the golf course with one of IFT's chief distributors. Will's hands rested on the white tablecloth and Harold's eyes darted down to them to check ( _please no_ ) that Will wasn't wearing green nailpolish.

He wasn't, but it was there around the edges, in his cuticles, invisible to the casual glance but there if you _looked,_ if you saw past the superficial. He had a sudden mental image of Will of a morning, hurried with the need to get out the door and head to one's first class of the day: scrubbing quick and careless at his fingertips with a papertowel damp with polish remover. Leaving traces behind, leaving clues to his other life that he played at, come night-times.

...and what did _Will_ see, when Will looked at him? More than he should, that much Harold knew. More than he had ever realized he was letting slip. Stupid, years of thinking that a child couldn't _perceive_ what went on all around him. And stupider when the child wasn't a child anymore.

“--take your glasses off, son,” Nathan was saying, and Harold tracked his attention back from the brown study he'd been slipping into to the conversation at hand.

Will made an exaggerated grimace, gesturing at the window full of gray sky. “Dad, there's something I have to tell you: I'm a vampire. The sunlight will kill me.”

Nathan snorted-- wry, knowing. “How late were you out?”

“...can I plead the Fifth?”

Nathan Ingram tried to give his son a stern look, which Harold thought was deeply hypocritical. Nathan's partying antics at MIT had been legendary. But then, perhaps that was what parenting was all about: _do as I say, not as I did._

“Take 'em off,” Nathan said, and Will groaned and complied, sliding the shades off. Beneath them his eyes were bloodshot, smudged under with a lack of sleep that made Harold wince to see it. There were so many reasons he had never understood the appeal of the party lifestyle, not at MIT and not now.

Nathan's look at his son was half-chiding, half-amused. “Hope last night was worth the hangover.”

Will answered with that sheepish Ingram smile, all charm, the smile that would make you forgive anything up to and including your homework being copied in the minutes before it was due. Harold watched the interplay, son to father, imperfect mirrors, with a curious hollow feeling that came from sitting on the outside, watching lies being executed, charades being perpetrated.

Normally he was only privy to Nathan's lies in such scenarios, lies that he himself was halfway responsible for.

Now, Nathan shook his head, lifted his wineglass for a sip that Harold half-consciously imitated. “You go and have your fun at nights, Will. Just remember our deal.”

“Yeah,” Will said. “Four-point-oh or I lose the apartment, I know.”

“ _And_ you don't miss classes.” Punctuated with a finger jabbing the air Will's direction; Will lifted his own hands in defense.

“Haven't missed one yet,” Will countered, and flopped back in his chair. Harold, who recalled Will's statement of his difficulties with his physics class, wondered if Will would be hunting a place to live soon.

The waiter returned with their desserts, the restaurant's signature burnt cream. Nathan's phone picked that moment to ring again, with a diabolical sense of timing that Harold might have blamed on his own hacking if not that he knew he wasn't responsible for it. This time there was no escaping the waiter's gimlet eye: that meticulously-dressed individual folded his hands before him and gave Nathan the blandest of looks while the phone chirped and buzzed and twitched merrily on the tablecloth.

“I'll.. just... take that outside, then,” Nathan managed under the waiter's beige stare.

“Of course, sir,” came the smooth response and smile.

Nathan shot them both a comically wide-eyed look before snatching up the still-ringing phone and making his way out of the sacred grounds of the restaurant to take his phone call (or more likely, return it, by the time he got out to the foyer).

And then it was just him and Will.

“...hey,” said Will.

“Mmh,” said Harold, and used his spoon to break through the crust of his custard. “So.”

“So,” Will echoed.

Harold took a bite of his custard. It was good. It always was, at Le Cirque. He barely tasted it.

“...I didn't call him _looking_ for you or anything,” Will said, to his own dessert.

“I didn't say you did.”

“Mnnm.”

Around them, the sounds of lunch conversation, forks on plates, knives on forks. Out the window, gray sky, stretching up forever. Feral New York pigeons ( _Columba livia_ ) clustered on an awning's edge in his line of sight, grey and black bodies nudging and settling and shifting, here and there the flutter of a wing as one bird prepared to depart from its fellows to harass the sidewalk.

He chose birds, he so often chose birds, because above all he prized the ability to fly away, traceless and effortless, from any situation, any complication.

Will sighed and pushed his crème around in the shallow dish, the motion drawing Harold's eye back to the table. He watched Will's hands on the spoon, the dark edges around his nails where the polish lingered.

“I'm sorry,” Will said, without raising his eyes from the spoon either. “The stuff I said back at the park-- I'm sorry if I upset you.”

Harold absorbed that. Especially the wording. He wondered if Nathan would have phrased it so carefully, made it a not-apology. It was-- subtler-- than the way Nathan did things. Maybe Will had picked it up from Olivia.

Maybe Will had picked it up from him.

“But not sorry you said it,” he observed in his turn, setting down his own spoon and reaching for his wineglass. A muscle tightened in Will's jaw, beneath a week's worth of stubble.

“Nope.”

Will looked tired-- exhausted really-- and wiped out. Harold felt, for a moment, guilty-- and then he reminded himself that it was unlikely Will had spent the last five days doing what he himself had done. Will looked _tired_ because he had been dancing or clubbing or drinking or having sex until God knew what hour, not because he had spent days obsessively replaying their last conversation and trying to train his thoughts away from exceedingly dangerous territory.

For that matter, he doubted Will had ever tried to train his mind away from something, ever. Will's life was not one that had included much in the way of denial.

Will grimaced and leaned back in his chair, lifting a hand to rub at his shoulder and back through his borrowed jacket. The fingers of his other hand (nails edged in chipped green) bumped against his sunglasses, as if Will was considering putting them back on. God, how late _had_ Will been partying the night before? It was nearly one in the afternoon.

The sleeve of borrowed-jacket slid up with the motion of Will's hand at his shoulder and Harold glanced there then back to the window-- then back there again.

There were faint, dark smudges on Will's wrist.

He acted, as he had on the sidewalk, before he really thought about it. He grabbed at Will's forearm, fingers hooked into the fabric, tugging it up Will's arm to get a better look while Will gawked at him.

Not big, not dark, but there: the imprints of a grip, of fingers dug hard into Will's wrist. Harold made a noise a bit like a teakettle and shot a stare up into Will's face.

“Did Joel do this?”

“....--what?” Will said after several seconds, blinking at him with his red-rimmed eyes. Harold resisted the urge to yell.

“Joel Warner. This fellow you're seeing,” Harold said, biting each word out like he was cutting them with Nathan's cigar clipper. “I didn't see anything about him to suggest anything like this but if he's--”

Will twisted his wrist from Harold's grip, gave him a look from an infinite and slightly fuzzy distance, and shook his head. “I haven't seen Joel in two weeks. It didn't work out. You're _way_ off base. Sorry, Harold.”

He stared a moment then slumped back into his own chair, momentarily at a loss. And feeling a sheepish heat rising to his cheeks as he realized what he'd just given away.

It took Will a few seconds longer to reach that conclusion but inevitably he did, eyes rising to meet Harold's from under that hopeless hair of his. “You checked him out,” said Will, and Harold looked away to the remnants of his pudding.

“You _did._ Jesus,” said Will, and laughed, a little fuzziness in his laughter too, in his loose sprawl in the chair.

This couldn't all be just a hangover. Harold felt an uneasy coolness in his gut to counter the heat in his face.

“-- _Will_ ,” he said, low, but sharp enough that Will half-straightened in the chair on reflex. “Will, did you-- are you-- _taking_ things?”

“...like what?” Will said a little slowly.

Harold took a deep breath. A quick glance to make sure neither Nathan nor anybody else was near enough to hear. “Like-- well, like _drugs,_ Will.”

The young man laughed, scooting himself back into sitting straight again and collecting his spoon once more. “Oh. I thought you meant like.... money, or something.”

“No, of course not--” Beat. “--Jesus _Christ,_ Will, _are_ you stealing money?!”

“ 'Course not,” Will said, light and airy as the crème brulee. “I'm not exactly hurting for cash, Harold, I don't know if you know this but I happen to be Nathan Ingram's son.”

Had it really been less than a week ago that he'd pondered how much Will would benefit from being chucked into the ice-edged pond in Central Park? Perhaps he'd been thinking too small. Ocean. Ocean would do.

Harold slid his glasses off and scrubbed at his face with his fingers. “ _Are_ you doing drugs, Will?”

Will popped his unshaven chin onto one hand and stared out the window. “When you say it like _that_ it sounds bad. I had some E at the club last night, that's all.”

….God help them. Mariana Trench. How much money would it take to dump Will at the bottom of the Mariana Trench? Likely he could afford it. Harold groaned and reached for his wineglass again, only to find that it had somehow emptied itself since his refill. The sips, apparently, had added up.

“Will, I told you I wouldn't out your _orientation_ to your father,” he began, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. “Or your activities related to that, within reason. But this is--”

“Hold up,” said Will, and reached out one hand to touch his own, freeze him mid-sentence. Will's lips were twitching into an inappropriate grin. “Hang on. Hang on. Let's go back to where you were checking out Joel to make sure he was okay for me to date, that shit was funny.”

“ _Will_...”

The grin went completely away. His hand went with it, thank God. Will leaned forward towards Harold, crossing his arms on the table. “Why're you doing that, Harold?”

God, why was it so impossible to keep control of the conversation where Will was concerned? Harold filled his cheeks with air then let it out in a slow exhale, staring at Nathan's empty chair across the table and wondering what the hell was taking him so long.

He laced his fingers tightly together on the tablecloth.

“Will. Just because-- no matter what you or I said at the park, I still care about you and your well-being, that's not going to change--”

“And that's the problem, isn't it?” Will said, dropping his eyes down again, from that look of challenge to the plates and cups instead. “You care about me.”

 _Of course I care about you._ Something safe to say a year ago, five years ago. Context changed. The rules changed, the roles changed, the lines and the lies and the world changed, every year, every day.

 _People_ changed. They grew up. Or at least, they were supposed to.

The focus here needed to be Will, Will and whatever suspect life choices he was making, not... anything else. Nothing about them. There was no _them_ for it to be about.

“ _Yes,_ Will, I care about you, because you are the son of my close friend--” (Will's hand clenched on the tablecloth, Harold kept going) “--and if you're doing something dangerous then that _matters,_ so, no, we're not going to be talking about what I've done, we're going to be talking about these habits you're picking up--”

“You can't even entertain the _thought,_ can you?” Will snapped. “You can't let yourself do _that much,_ because you're too scared.”

“There is _nothing to entertain.”_

Will looked on the verge of yelling, as he had yelled in the park. Will looked ready to lose his temper. Nathan probably already would have, in some parallel universe.

“You're such a hypocrite,” Will said, flat as a slap to the face. He stared despite himself, much as Will had stared when he'd grabbed his sleeve.

Nathan saved him from responding, as if summoned by his unending comparisons of son to father: moving back through the tables, tall and blond, cutting an effortless swath in his navy power suit and general Nathan-ness.

“Sorry about that,” he said, smoothing his tie down as he took his seat again. “Shareholder crisis back at the office. I think I'm going to have to take my dessert with me.”

“Oh? That's too bad,” Harold said, pushing his own chair back and plucking his napkin from his collar.

Nathan waved a hand at him in negation. “Don't feel like the two of you have to stop eating on my account.”

“Oh no,” said Harold, getting to his feet and collecting his coat from the fourth, empty chair at their table. “I should be getting back to my office myself, and besides--” a sidelong glance at Will, who was stubbornly silent, his hands dangling from the chair's armrests.

“--I was quite finished.”

****

(Dear Monstar: There is more to come on this fic, a LOT more. I am sorry you are getting an unfinished fic! I will try really hard to get the next scenes written in a timely fashion so you are not waiting too long to see what happens next. It was either make you wait a few more weeks or give you something only partly done. I hope you like what there is so far, at least!)


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